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In A First, Google Does Real-time Joint Retail Trials
Large chains typically like to stock the most popular items, while smaller chains—and certainly family-owned single-location stores—gravitate toward niche or unusual items. But think about it. When some small antique shop gets an unusual item, it’s generally hoping to attract a consumer who is browsing rather than a browser that is consuming. The alternative is to try and match that unusual product with a customer who really needs it.
“Well, somebody will want it,” says the merchandise buyer. True, perhaps, but how to connect the two? What are the odds that one of those people who needs that item will happen to drive by that store and decide to walk inside. Even if that happens, what are the odds that the item will be displayed right then or that the customer would even notice it? Local inventory search, once enough products are in its clutches, has massive potential.
Before that can happen, there are quite a few cost issues that have to be dealt with. Even though some services are offering to accept the feeds from retailers for free, the cost of getting their product databases in shape to offer this kind of feed is overwhelming. “What does it cost a small independent retailer to take advantage of that service?” asked Dan Butler, the VP/Retail Operations for the National Retail Federation. “Many of them struggle to just keep their sites up and running.”
Technically, a retailer wouldn’t have to have a Web site to use such a service. But Butler found that quite unlikely. “If they have don’t a site, they wouldn’t have the mindset” to organize, catalogue and keep all of their product info current.
For that and 50 other reasons, there’s little debate that the smaller merchants will be the last to get involved in local inventory search. “For one thing, there’s a certain amount of activity that is happening with the larger retailers, a more robust API system that allows them to more easily deliver that kind of information,” said Ron Levi, VP of product at TheFind.com, which specializes in Web product search.
Levi’s own engine is also just toying with this kind of information. “It’s limited. It’s not been extended to all inventory, and it’s not perfectly accurate. But it’s a step in the right direction,” Levi said.
Even if you were to combine all of the products searched by Google and other search engines, it barely would cover one-thousandth of one percent of the products in the inventory of the major retailers plus millions of not-so-major retailers. How much would a consumer be willing to pay if your software discovered the specific product they sought was a mere 10 minutes away, if they only knew where to look?
To make this capability viable and truly useful to residents of one region (defined as, perhaps, an area within a 45-minute to a one-hour drive), the engines would have to realize at least a one- and perhaps a two-percent complete database. More is better. But once the one-percent barrier is broken, the chance of actually finding the desired item becomes relatively likely.
Levi suggests that some products will be very difficult to catalogue without a lot of manual typing–items such as handmade goods, custom clothing, bait and tackle, etc. “Most of those are not going to have a UPC. That makes it a much greater challenge to normalize them,” he said.
-Marc
March 18th, 2010 at 9:14 am
Interesting and natural move for Goggle given they already plot layers (e.g restaurants, gas stations) on top of maps on mobile devices. But Google is behind Shop Savvy in this product search effort. With the Shop Savvy mobile app, you use the phone camera to scan the product package barcode (UPC, etc.) and up pops a list of web and store competitors in the area also selling the same product, for how much, with customer reviews. Both solutions support consumer control over product information using mobile technology.
March 18th, 2010 at 10:17 am
Editor’s Note: Google also supports the barcode scan, as do many others.
March 18th, 2010 at 11:55 am
As mentioned, the key to satisfying consumer demand is “data normalization”. Normalization involves recognizing what are considered equivalent products. The challenge is that “equivalent” could mean something completely different to each consumer. You don’t need to know what the inventory is until you know what you want to buy. So before an inventory application is in place, a good product data base that allows consumers to search by product characteristics is necessary. Big retailers have already done this by allowing consumers to search by brand and major features such as LCD vs Plasma, screen size, etc. If the consumers are going to a retailer’s site to determine what they want, I am not sure how likely they are going to be to go somewhere else to screen inventory.
Amazon seems to have recognized this, combining a lot of the searching with links to various online retailers besides themselves. To that point, Amazon seems a better place to meet consumer demand for this type of service. Small brick and mortar retailers can load their inventory onto Amazon.
But in any case, the challenge is to avoid disappointing a consumer who jumps in their car and arrives at the store only to find the inventory is wrong or has been depleted.
March 18th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Goog point, Bill. All such displays should have a default note in prominent type: “Please call first.” On a mobile app–or just a site accessed via a mobile device–that can even be a link to the store’s listed phone number.
March 18th, 2010 at 3:21 pm
This may be more of a question… Recently launched POS SaaS offerings for small and mid-sized retailers (brick&mortar and webfront) are being reasonably quickly adopted. The retailer’s inventory is stored in the POS system on a “cloud server”, usually identified by the manufacturer’s SKU/barcode.
SMB inventory aggregating sites (e-stores)over the years have often required their own inventory recording in addition to the retailer’s own POS system. This never works.
However, if it was relatively simple to integrate an SMB SaaS POS system with a major search site like what Google is doing–wouldn’t that solve the problem of hyper local inventory discovery and management?